DOJ investigation finds that Louisiana’s practice of prisoner overdetention violates 14th Amendment

Yesterday, the Department of Justice issued a report finding that Louisiana’s longstanding practice of overdetaining freed prisoners violates the US Constitution. The DOJ investigation determined that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC) “incarcerates thousands of individuals each year beyond their legal release dates in violation of the 14th Amendment of the US… Read More

Prison Reform Mississippi Style?

Given the South’s problematic history with equal justice issues, this may be surprising: a Mississippi county may be on its way to becoming a national leader in local prison reform. In May 2015, the Justice Department found that Hinds County, Mississippi’s jails were “in crisis” (which says a lot, considering the very low bar of our poor… Read More

2016 Presidential Candidates on Prison Reform and Mass Incarceration

For our final post in our three-part series focused on the 2016 presidential election, we take a look at the candidates’ views on mass incarceration and prison reform. We touched on this briefly in the previous post centered on the Black Lives Matter movement, but today we’ll dive a little deeper into specific initiatives regarding… Read More

Cost of Incarceration

Any conversation with our wrongfully convicted clients opens your eyes to just how difficult reentry into society is after a period of incarceration. Of course, everyone’s story following incarceration is inherently different. Some have a large support network of family and friends; others struggle through reentry on their own. Some were incarcerated for decades and… Read More

Martin Luther King Day and You

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. On Martin Luther King Day this year, let’s think about how we can contribute to fighting injustice. All year, we blog about how broken our criminal justice system is, but we rarely talk about what can be done about it on a… Read More